More bad news out of China? How will this affect Tencent, Funcom, Conan Exiles, Dune?

That, right there, is the key thing that gets overlooked when talking about “voting with your wallet”. I totally agree with you, but the problem is that “healthy competition” is much rarer and more limited than people would like to believe, so the Invisible Hand gets touted as a silver bullet with an almost-religious fervor.

If you have the time, I would encourage you (and everyone else) to watch a keynote from DEF CON 18, “Changing Threats to Privacy” by Moxie Marlinspike:

It doesn’t directly discuss this same topic we’re discussing here, but it’s very thought-provoking and it showcases some of the ways we can reach the point where “vote with your wallet” is not a solution.

The problem with this sentiment is that even severely limiting what happens at the government level also can involve a lot of people dying (or worse), and does so a lot more often than people would believe. It’s easy to extol the virtues of laissez-faire when most of the stuff you consume are manufactured by child labor somewhere else.

Agreed, but the difficulty lies in agreeing when we’ve reached the last resort point.

Maybe we are getting there, maybe we aren’t. I personally believe this is still one of those things where parents can do a good job and we don’t need a government intervention the way we did with smoking, for example.

And even if we did, it certainly shouldn’t be a draconian law with ulterior motives, like the ones CCP is making.

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Generally I agree with you. This might be a different case though, as competition for a cigarette company is just another cigarette company. Some practices or products are just harmful and regulation/legislation might be appropriate.

Maybe I missed the whole point of the conversation?
A - We were discussing Chinas policies and China is NOT a democratic state.
B - I already prefaced my statement with a disclaimer (it depends who is doing the banning)
C - Nice try at evading the question, or just poor comprehension.

If its that bad than it is too late to do anything about it. If the big evil corporations have everyone brainwashed, then no legislation is possible, they’ll just tell the brainwashed to vote in favor of them.

Course I don’t believe that. People aren’t nearly as dumb as you think they are. They either want big government to make their decisions for them, or can’t be arsed to take a stand and want their next Madden or Battlefront.

The issue isn’t people being groomed, the issue is people are lazy.

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OK, it seems like you really didn’t follow my posts.

A: This thread was about China but I was never talking about China directly. I just commented that other governments (e.g. democratic ones) should follow their lead with regard to loot boxes. In my opinion.

B: I don’t see how this is relevant to you accusing me of supporting extreme governmental control sorry.

C: I didn’t evade your question at all. I thought I was clear but apparently not. I think the policy is a decent idea; not that extreme governmental control is a good idea. They’re not at all the same thing. That’s why I said you made a straw man, because you tried to make it sound as if I supported the CCP and their tactics in general when i just said one of their policies was a good idea.

Come on, can’t we all just agree that people are stupid and lazy…

Ok, fine, more seriously - I find myself agreeing with different thoughts from a variety of contributors on this thread. @Firecrow is not wrong IMO about the levels of influence held by powerful corporations (though I hope we are not so far gone, yet, as Taemien suggests that would mean). But if we just take the relatively famous examples of supermarkets - the customer is subjected to constant manipulation the entire time we are within the store. The fresh fruit and veg is placed near the front, because psychologists determined that this gives us an immediate impression of the freshness of everything in the store, and the bright colours create attractive displays. The fresh-baked bread smell is pumped to the front of the store, because it works on primal parts of our brains and makes us hungry. Short-term offers encourage us to buy products we otherwise wouldn’t have. The check-outs are ringed by ‘impulse purchases’ (the very term itself revealing their ‘purpose’), to encourage us to buy a little more (and because children see them and bug tired parents to buy them for them while they are stood waiting (and thus cannot lead the child away from the shelf and distract them).

And any industry that has customers, will naturally gravitate to whatever psychological tactics can be used to sell more of their products and make more money. It is the inherent state of capitalism - in order to be competitive in their field, companies must use whatever tricks and tactics are available to them. (Did you know that the ‘traditional’ idea of orange juice at breakfast was invented by an advertising guru to sell more orange juice?) (This isn’t about right or wrong - it’s just the way the system works.)

I would like @Glurin and Taemien to be right - I would like competition and voting with our wallets to control companies’ actions - but we seem to be inherently easier to manipulate than corporations are, they have a single drive towards profit, while we have myriad conflicting drives pulling us in different directions. At the same time, trusting governments to dictate a solution seems naive (especially since many of them now operate a revolving door policy with the corporate sector, ensuring the individual politicians have personal vested interests in corporate success) - just from experience it appears they go one of two ways; either supporting corporate interests over the consumers, or adding yet another layer of bureaucracy and waste to ineffectually manage whatever issue they claimed to be resolving.

And that’s without even getting into the issue of competition - as @CodeMage points out - a lot of corporate sectors really aren’t as competitive as we’d like to imagine. I could write an(other) essay on various industries that use fake competition to disguise monopoly practices (the privatised UK rail network being a good example).

Ultimately, I’d like personal responsibility and parental decision-making to be the controlling factors, especially in a situation like the original post is discussing. But at the same time, companies cannot be left completely unregulated, because that just leads to ever more predatory behaviours. Is regulating individuals’ uses of their free time to play computer games (children or otherwise) really acceptable? I don’t know. But we regulate people’s use of addictive drugs - and that seems to me to be quite a closely related question (and a whole 'nother debate :wink: ).

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It’s not that bad yet, but it might get that bad if people don’t stand up and complain/resist. And corporate interests interfere with governments all the time.

I cant speak for everyone in the world, but I think the whole point of government is to protect citizens from harm. That’s why we elect them.

The default answer to this and similar questions is and always should be no. The price tag is always much higher than anyone realizes. Remember, once a government seizes power over something, it’s damn near impossible to get them to relinquish it later no matter how much harm they caused.

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Ok, so as far as I understand it, China has banned all young people under 18 from playing more than 3 hours a night, and just on weekends. What has this to do with lootboxes again?

Also, now that I have pinpointed your argument, I totally disagree with you on this subject of Western democracies following their lead.
There is not one iota of proof that gaming online makes you into a monster or killer. On the other hand, there IS proof that using cigarettes causes lung cancer, etc.

Once you can prove cause and effect, then make informed laws based on the science. Until then, it is just a dictatorship pushing their will on their people.

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The example I always like to use for that is Income Tax in the UK, which was only passed as a temporary measure to pay for a war (I believe Napoleonic) - but somehow, centuries later, the temporary measure is still in place. Sadly for the modern world, this seems to be something that many people don’t realise.

(But then, of course, the same question, and I would argue same answer, has to apply to other addictive actions - drugs/alcohol etc - which society as a whole seems to prefer to legislate ‘solutions’ to. And then, where does that logically extend to? Wouldn’t the same logic of ‘it’s for your/their own good’ also apply to things like diet and exercise - I find it hard to imagine anyone who supports the idea of governments limiting gaming (or drug use) would actually support mandated diets and exercise, but I also find it hard to see how it can be justified to legislate one and not the other. But then, before this past couple of years, I would have found it hard to believe that so many people would support government lockdowns, no matter the cause, and yet many do. So who knows. Maybe the default position for the majority of humanity is one of wanting external rules to avoid having to think about our own solutions. As with the free speech debate, I would like the default choice to be individual responsibility rather than top-down legislation, but again I find myself questioning whether humans are truly capable of it.)

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Interesting side note, the same is true of income tax in the U.S. Initially implemented as a means to pay for the civil war and was repealed about ten years later. It was then re-implimented in 1913 with the 16th amendment and I’m sure assurances that it would stay in the relative 10% range. It started at 7% and took just three years to more than double, then it jumped to 77% to pay for WW1, and then went as high as 94% with WW2. After that it took all the way until 1982 for it to finally dip back down to 50%.

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Its a grey area most devs and publishers don’t want to burn their fingers on.

If you buy like 20 boxes for example and are able to win it for a max set of price it is “allowed” (bit of a grey area some publishers use to sell loot boxes on), but if there is a change no matter how much money you spend and are not able to win the jackpot it’s forbidden.

The sad side of this is… some game devs/publishers just IP block us… so we can’t play the game at all (Belgium as well btw).
So for the little amount of people with this addiction problem the whole country can’t play the go**mn game…

But hey, poker (with real money) is allowed, at least they have this sorted. What a clowns…

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China’s cracking down on things like homosexuality and transgenderism. Something tells me they’re not too concerned with a game like CE that has big, tough barbarians. But mainly, these restrictions are purely for their own people. China’s not going to do anything that could endanger all that foreign money coming in.

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OH HELL NO! I can practice good parenting without an overlord, thank you very much.

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Well, so much for that statement. :roll_eyes:

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You’re right that Funcom owns the Conan IP as of today, but unless I’ve missed something, they don’t own the Dune IP.

Dune may be the only IP left they still have to license.

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Wishful thinking. Homosexuality and transgenderism aren’t the only things China has cracked down on. Not only are they going after gaming in general, but when it comes to content within entertainment, they’ve also gotten tough on skeletons, blood, nudity, time travel, winnie the pooh, gambling, violence, sex, anything negative about the CCP including actual history, religion, tattoos, The Big Bang Theory tv show, Jasmine flowers, Christmas, the words disagree, oppose and emperor, the NBA, reincarnation, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the letter ‘N’.

And that’s just the tip of of the iceberg. I assure you, they aren’t that worried about losing out on foreign money.

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Ok, fine, more seriously - I find myself agreeing with different thoughts from a variety of contributors on this thread. @Firecrow is not wrong IMO about the levels of influence held by powerful corporations (though I hope we are not so far gone, yet, as Taemien suggests that would mean). But if we just take the relatively famous examples of supermarkets - the customer is subjected to constant manipulation the entire time we are within the store. …

the advanced in neuromarketing takes advantage of the advanced in neuro science and it is more and more important in our daily life, personally it frightens me even more than the subliminal images which have been written a lot of ink
really a great discussion here and I am constantly surprised on this forum
merci

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@JJDancer, you can’t have pinpointed my argument, because I haven’t really made one. I shared an opinion just like everyone else, but for some reason you instantly took it to an extreme and misrepresented me as thinking government oppression was a good idea. Since then I haven’t really been in the discussion because I’ve been defending myself against your posts. If you go back and read our exchanges, you’ll see that I haven’t engaged with your opinion at all - I accept that it’s your opinion, and that’s fine. All I’ve done is try to set the record straight as you’ve desperately tried to twist what I’ve said into pretzels. You’ve just done it again by the way. Do I think excessive gaming is bad for people? Yes. I thought this was uncontroversial but maybe I’m in the minority here. Do I think it turns people into monsters? No! I think it’s bad for them. Where did you even get that from and why are you demanding I prove it’s not true?

I don’t owe you a justification for my opinions and honestly at this point I feel like if I gave any you’d just attribute a bunch of terrible ideas to me and talk past me, because that’s what’s happened so far. I kinda feel like you’re trolling me so I’m going to stop responding to you. Feel free to have the last word.

@DanQuixote, @Glurin, Taemien and others I appreciate your posts and would like to have a proper discussion about this, but it doesn’t feel like a good environment for me to do so. I sense that my view of the role and function of government is really at odds with most of the posters here for whatever reason and frankly I don’t have time to support my opinions by laying out my entire worldview from scratch. It also wouldn’t achieve anything and the idea of it is exhausting lol. Just so you know where I’m basically coming from though I’ll say this:

Various posters are saying that people are lazy, or want government to control them so they don’t have to make decisions. This is not where I’m coming from. I think adult, responsible citizens should want to sacrifice their freedoms for the good of the group if necessary.

There’s an apparently widespread view that governments are always insidiously trying to increase power and control over the people and have to be resisted. I don’t think this is true at all. It may be true in some times and places, but right now in the west at least we live in (albeit flawed) democracies. We are the government and if it can’t function it’s because we all failed. Of course I think that adults should be responsible for themselves, and parents should be responsible for children, but if something is undermining people’s very ability to be responsible then collective action should be taken.

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